Free Archaeologist Art

A few years back I was approached by an archaeologist of my acquaintance who completely fits the "Ready To Fight Giant Ants At Any Moment" academic stereotype.

"I am organising a community archaeology project," said the Professor. "And I need my literature to be accessible to all humans. Would you be willing to draw me some child friendly pictures of archaeologists engaging in various fieldwork activities?"

Now, there was something about the way that the Professor said "all humans" that made me deeply suspect that he didn't count himself as human. I was so busy internally debating whether he was a disguised robot/lizard-person/super-evolved-floating-brain-from-the-future, that I said "yes" without first asking for any money.

Anyway, the project didn't get quite as much interest as he needed and the pictures languished unused; that is until I decided to put them here! Should any archaeologists pass by, happening to need some child friendly doodles, feel free to make use of my pictures. If it is possible to credit me, so much the better!

Return To The Crystal Temple Of The The Lost Vault of Kor-Avul-Thaa

By which I mean it is once again time to look through the Ancient Portable Hard-Drive Of Mystery!

These images represent some of my first experiments with GIMP, even more so than my previous archive post. The first two pictures are entries into old 2000ad Forum Art Competitions. To give you an idea of how old they are, this was back in the day when the 2000ad Forum was just a white screen with a blue margin and a big long list of threads arranged in order of recent additional posts. Which, if you don't know the 2000ad Forum, is probably more recently than you are thinking.

This one was for the prompt Set The Controls For The Heart Of The Sun! 

Next up we have Mega-City 1. Those few words do not fully convey the difficulty one would face in approaching such a topic. The world of Judge Dredd has had some spectacular artists work on it in the past, and trying to even come close to emulating their work only made me appreciate it more.

As a warning before clicking, this image is a little on the big side.

This final one is not from an art comp. In fact, I'm not even going to try and elaborate on this one; if you know, you know, and if not then it is a little bit difficult to explain...

Raiding The Lost Vault of Kor-Avul-Thaa

By which I mean; I have recently been searching through a portable hard-drive filled with time lost curiosities. Hidden within were various writings and pieces of art that had been left on an old house-mate's computer. Sifting through them was a bit like opening a secret portal into the past, and though it was a past not too distant, it is still a disturbing and unsettling place to visit. There were extracts from my woeful dissertation, photos of the skulls of species long extinct, and toe bones, lots of toe bones.

There was also a variety of sketches, entries into art competitions, and a collection of ideas for a Lovecraftian kid's fun activity book, which is a project I really need to revisit one day. Then there was the Random Violence art.

Random Violence is a board game being produced by a friend of mine, and back at university I was doing some artwork for it. The game was like a table-top version of Unreal Tournament, set in a near future cyber-punkish Japan. My brief was to make the character cards, which would show the character you were playing, and also be covered in lots of statistics and boxes that you would put equipment cards on and such like.

The necessity to put in lots of information goes some way towards explaining  why there is so much dead space here, but this is also due to these pieces representing my very first experiments at making art using a computer. You will notice I used colour! You will notice I didn't really know what I was doing! You will notice I haven't worked this way since!